Boy, I really feel bad for this guy:
A Massachusetts high school principal who was quoted in a magazine as saying that some teenagers had made a pact to get pregnant has resigned.
Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan said Tuesday that he doesn’t have the trust, confidence or respect of the mayor and superintendent.
Whyever did he lose the trust of the mayor and superintendent? Maybe because he asserted that a pregnancy pact existed in his school that did not, in fact, exist? Maybe because that nonexistent pact was used to slut-shame every girl in Gloucester, especially the girls who got pregnant? Maybe because being a teenage parent is hard enough without your principal throwing you to the wolves — and because any principal that would throw you to the wolves obviously doesn’t have the interests of his students at heart?
Of course, he’s really mad at everyone but himself:
In a statement obtained by the Gloucester Daily Times on Tuesday, Sullivan said he “gave a direct, truthful and honest answer,” when asked by a reporter about the topic.
“In the aftermath of that interview, while I was advised by the superintendent of schools not to make any public comments, and while I had to move out of my own house to avoid ‘news’ reporters and harassing phone calls, the mayor held a press conference and publicly slandered my reputation, my integrity and my intelligence,” he said.
Slander is, strictly speaking, making a statement about somebody that is knowingly false. Mr. Sullivan, you said that students in your school, students you’re supposed to care about, had made a pregnancy pact. You said this to a national magazine. You said this with no evidence to back it up. And it was demonstrably false. Had my daughter been one of your students, even one of the “good” ones who didn’t get pregnant, I’d be screaming for you to be fired, every day from now until doomsday. You deserved to have your integrity and your intelligence questioned, and if your reputation is in tatters, well, at least you haven’t had not one, but two articles written about you in Time, explaining why you’re a dirty slut who can’t keep your legs closed. At least you didn’t have your sexual life dissected on national television by people who didn’t even know you. At least nobody indicated that you made your horribly irresponsible decisions about reproduction by yourself, or that your partner was not even to be part of the conversation, unless she could be used to make you look bad.
In short, if people refrain from spitting on you, I think your reputation is about where it belongs, and it is my fervent wish that you never, never, never be placed in a position of authority in education ever again.
Seriously. Is there anyone who didn’t read about this pact and immediately call bullshit?
(If I ever remembered how to do that there fancy block-quoting, I’d do it!)
Seriously. Is there anyone who didn’t read about this pact and immediately call bullshit?
Well, sadly, yeah. I mean, without meaning to be Captain Obvious here, I think that’s kind of the problem.
Teenagers are morons. The described pact was moronic behavior. It is therefore consistent to a first-order approximation of what we’d expect from teenagers.
Did it happen? Beats me. It sounds like something teenagers would do, but nobody has presented any evidence of it. Two of the teenagers saying “nuh uh!” has pretty much zero value as evidence; people will deny murder as you catch them with their hands dripping blood over the corpse. Something seems to have triggered a statistically very unusual event; “some teenagers decided to be really dumb” is an explanatory theory with built-in plausibility. Plus it assigns agency to girls, which is also plausible, since girls have all kinds of agency.
But I’m not married to the theory. What’s your superior alternative explanation for a quadrupling of the pregnancy rate in one particular school?
That said, I condemn the slut shaming.
There may be condemnation to legitimately be handed out, in any cases where those teen pregnancies were done carelessly; on the other hand, some of those girls are likely old enough to know what they are doing. But even in the former case, the condemnation to be made is for poor decisions, not “sex is bad you dirty whores”.
And (as in almost all cases), I do embrace them for choosing to keep their children.
Given how much of my time I spend dealing with teenagers, I have to also say that it did not sound completely implausible to me either. The fact that it would be cosmically dumb did not eliminate it as likely. And if you want to find someone who is in complete denial about the consequences of their behavior and ready to deny to the death in the face of overwhelming evidence that they committed said behavior, just go grab your nearest American teenager and you’ve got a good shot at having ahold of a stellar example.
Nor the parents, nor the students. But why would they be a consideration, eh?
Robert and Ron, if forming large pregnancy pacts is the sort of behavior we should commonly expect from teens, then shouldn’t there be at least once case in which you could show that it actually occurred?
Why do you think it needs explanation?
There are around 15,000 high schools in the USA. Furthermore, this story might have happened any time during the last 10 years, but let’s be generous and call it 5; that’s 75,000 sample points. Of those 75,000 sample points, there is one that we know of in which the pregnancy rate was four times higher than average.
For one high school, in one year, to have an uptick in its pregnancy rate is something that could happen by random chance.
Actually, I suspect this sort of random fluctuation in pregnancy rates has happened dozens of times by chance, and what’s most unusual about this one is not that it happened, but that it became national news.
Actually, I suspect this sort of random fluctuation in pregnancy rates has happened dozens of times by chance, and what’s most unusual about this one is not that it happened, but that it became national news.
Not to mention that Gloucester’s pregnancy rate in 2005 was roughly what it was in 2007, suggesting 2006 — the year this big jump is based on — might have been the outlier.
“It may have happened” != “It’s common”. Rank stupidity is a common behavior among teens. But this is an extreme form of rank stupidity, even for teens (although I do recall a thread on here whose title was along the lines of ‘Pregnancy is a rational behavior for black teens’). So it’s reasonable to expect that a) it would occur, but b) it would be rare.
Mind you, I also find it perfectly believable that the Gloucester principal made the whole thing up. Mendacity among public school officials is probably as common as teenage rank stupidity. I don’t offer the above as evidence that it did happen as the principal held, just as a rational basis for not disbelieving reports of the existence of such a pact among a few teenage girls out of hand.
Why do you think it needs explanation?
Statistical intuition that it’s significant.
Someone else might bother to crunch the numbers and see if the intuition is on the right track; I don’t care enough. I won’t be shocked to find that it isn’t, or that it is.
This reminds me of lipstick parties, and the fervor about those. And jelly bracelets. And, um, what was the latest?
While I agree that teens do a lot of stupid shit–including getting pregnant, BTW, which is generally a bad idea for a teen–it doesn’t seem that this particular accusation was accurate. Which MATTERS, you guys, doesn’t it? Robert, RonF: since when did the burden of proof flip around here?
Um, no. Stop lumping all the millions of people between the age of 13 and 19, across racial, gender, socioeconomic and national lines, and across the entire history of time, together just because they’re sort of the same age, for one. Also, I have no idea how old you are, but I’m going to guess you’re older than me, because at age twenty I have a pretty good memory of my teenage years. Some teenagers do moronic things, but that doesn’t make them morons. There are places in the world even now where people are expected to get married and start having children during their teen years. Most Western teenagers have jobs, either part-time or full-time. They drive, some more recklessly than others, but they’re legally allowed to do so. In many places, they’re expected to pick a college, pick a major, pick a life, if they’re from a wealthy-enough background. They’re allowed to join the military. They’re allowed to vote. They’re allowed to smoke, and in most countries, they’re allowed to drink. And yes, they have sex. Some screw up, others don’t.
But insisting that they’re all, every single one, morons? Just shows that you have a very, very bad memory, and that condescending is easier for you to do than understanding is.
Sailorman, it’s not an issue of proof. The question I am addressing is the one that Amp raised in post #1, “Is there anyone who didn’t read about this pact and immediately call bullshit?” (the correct answer being “Me!”), not “What proof is there for the principal’s allegation?” The principal should be required to provide proof of his allegations, and absent such proof I’d question it. I can believe the principal is lying. But I wouldn’t immediately assume he was.
Well gee, from what I can tell the increased pregnancy rate equals slightly more than 3%. (And either enrollment has increased in recent years, or they lose a lot of students.) Four times zero still equals zero.
(That’s 3% of female students, using the larger of the two numbers I saw for pregnancies.)
This story made http://detentionslip.org! Voted #1 for crazy news headlines in education.
Pingback: Ten Post Round-Up: Ball of Confusion Edition :: The Sirens Chronicles
Pingback: Ten Post Round-Up: Ball of Confusion Edition « The Dark Diva Diaries
The school principle, denies ever having claimed that there was a pact. Thus in addition to having no evidence to support the allegation, there is no allegation.
(He does admit to claiming that the girls became pregnant deliberately (for which he also has no evidence). It’s possible that he said “pact”, but it’s just as plausible that the reporter made that bit up.)
Considering that a co-worker’s 17-year-old daughter just got her self pregnant, deliberately, as an act to keep her boyfriend (her mother found the pill prescription unfilled), I didn’t have any trouble believing the “pact” theory either.
I mean, I’m sure we’d all like to imagine that the principal is heroically concealing his source and taking the fall to protect some poor little girl who spoke out about the pact from persecution by her peers or something…. but more likely he was covering his ass and speculating as an explanation for a skyrocketing statistic.
Of course, the only alternate explanation I have for their little baby-boom is the Hollywood fetishization of the new batch of mega-star moms.
Pingback: Poor Victimised Joseph | Feminist Critics
We used this in a post at the CA NOW blog: http://www.canow.org/canoworg/2008/08/principal-who-l.html